Ways to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills I didn’t realize it at the time, but my teacher was giving a concise summary of critical thinking . My high school teachers gave similar speeches when describing what would be expected of us in college: it’s not about the facts you know, but rather about your ability to evaluate them. And now that I’m in college, my professors often mention that the ability to think through and solve difficult problems matters more in the “real world” than specific content. Despite hearing so much about critical thinking all these years, I realized that I still couldn’t give a concrete definition of it, and I certainly couldn’t explain how to do it. It seemed like something that my teachers just expected us to pick up in the course of our studies. While I venture that a lot of us did learn it, I prefer to approach learning deliberately, and so I decided to investigate critical thinking for myself. What is it, how do we do it, why is it imp